Of bees, moles and other creatures

I realise I've done it again – one month since my last blog! Well, I'm still here in mid-Wales at Old Chapel Farm and the summer is as wet here as it is for everyone else, although we have had some surprisingly scorching days too.

I have finally managed to do some bee work. On a relatively warm and windless day Fran showed me how to dress in the gear, which consisted of a hat, mesh 'veil' and white long-sleeved cotton tunic all-in-one and white trousers. Then I had to tuck the trousers in my wellies, the tunic into my trousers and don a pair of Marigolds fastened over the sleeves of the tunic with rubber bands! We then approached the hives, one of which we were going to carefully dismantle to inspect the health of the colony. Fran puffed some smoke into the doorway of the hive – this apparently fools the bees into thinking that the hive is on fire so they start to ingest honey in preparation to 'abandon ship' and this takes their mind off the fact that there are two humans dressed in strange garb taking their home apart! I was extremely nervous until I realised that the gear was relatively bee-proof but it was still quite unnerving as the bees got more agitated to have them bumping against the veil in front of my face. My first introduction went off well, but a few days later Fran asked me to show another WWOOFer the hives and dismantle the other hive, on my own, to show her the various cells within the hive! I must admit that when we got down to the lowest level where there was a tremendous amount of bee activity and they were at their most agitated, I chickened out after lifting out just two frames to examine and decided that we'd seen enough for one day. At least I think this is something I could do in the future with a bit more hands-on experience, so the bee hive that Dave gave me for my birthday a few years ago may well get used after all!

The egg hatch was very disappointing – I'm not sure what went wrong, but from 33 eggs we only got 9 live chicks. It was such a shame, but Fran saw some for sale not too far away, so the following Sunday we went to just south of Oswestry and bought 11 more chicks, 3 slightly older birds and 5 which were big enough to introduce directly into the existing flock. In another coincidental moment, the address of the place we were trying to find was the same lane in which I had looked at a For Sale cottage when I was staying in Oswestry, so I was able to navigate Fran straight there! She also bought a fully-automatic incubator from the woman – I have warned her that hatching eggs can become addictive, but I don't think she believes me!

Unfortunately, all has not been well in the animal department. The sheep have become infected with New Forest Eye, a type of contagious conjunctivitis. They had it when I was here last September and I spent an awful lot of time treating them then. This time it has not been quite so bad but we have been getting a few new cases each week for the last month, so a lot of time has been spent bringing the various small flocks of sheep into the handling pens and checking them closely for signs of runny or cloudy eyes and then treating the eyes with an eye ointment that has to e squeezed into the gap between the lower eyelid and the eye. This is not an easy task with sheep that are struggling and moving their heads all the time – although I am now something of an expert! I get to demonstrate how to do it to each new bunch of WWOOFers, plus the odd injection of antibiotic in the severe cases.

I was about to start a week of intensive cow milking practice when the easier of the two cows to milk went very lame and could barely put her foot to the ground. It didn't seem fair to make her stand still while a virtual novice took half an hour to milk her, so I still haven't done that. However, I did get to give my first cow injections! I'd suggested to Fran that the cow might need an antibiotic injection, but she'd never done it before so was a bit hesitant to try. I'd seen Barry do it loads of times when he worked on the dairy farm so said I didn't mind doing it, if necessary. Eventually, the cow was obviously not getting better on her own, so Fran went to the vet's and got some antibiotic, syringes and needles and instructions on how to administer it. The theory of giving an injection and the practice of giving an injection are two totally different things as I found out when presented with a haltered cow, 20ml of antibiotic and a needle fully 1.5 inches long! I took a deep breath, tapped the cow smartly with my fist on the injection point a couple of times and then plunged in the needle – she hardly flinched! I was then able to insert the syringe into the needle and depress the plunger – job done! I had to do it the next day, too as Fran was away for the day, but she did the next two injections herself. At the same time we discovered that one of the heifers on the hill had a massively distorted teat covered in warts. The vets thought that it might be summer mastitis, which is unusual but not unknown in cows which have never had calves, so we had to give her antibiotic injections too and try to milk the infection out of her. I wondered how on earth we were going to achieve this with a young cow that had rarely been handled, let alone milked, but then I remembered a trick that Barry taught me – you hold the cow's tail over her back and she is (in theory) unable to kick. Luckily this worked but it soon became apparent that there was no infection to milk out, so I took a photo of the teat and Fran took it to the vet's who realised that it was just a massive infestation of warts, for which there is no treatment other than time in which the cow develops its own immunity to the virus, so we could stop giving her the antibiotics.

In between all of this animal activity, I have been trying to sort out climbing roses and vines in my garden and also planting out young lupins, wallflowers and sweet peas wherever I can find spaces. It has been a real uphill struggle as I seem unable to spend much time in my garden as I am supervising other people with their animal problems. Last week I was weeding in one of the flower beds when I saw a movement under the soil near my hand. I waited a moment or two until it happened again and then plunged my gloved hand into the soil........... and pulled out a mole! It was quite a large mole so I put him in the bucket that I was collecting weeds in and showed him to Fran. We then showed him to all the other WWOOFers at teabreak and then I took him down the lane and released him into a field well away from the garden. I took a couple of photos and a short video before he trundled off into the grass and disappeared. Brilliant!

A new word has been coined here – Janitized! It is because I have a habit of tidying and sorting things out. First of all it was kitchen cupboards (this is still ongoing!), then it was the tool shed and then it was the bee equipment shed. I have also started on the laundry room and, if I had my way, all the wine in the brewery would be gathered together by variety and year of making! I thought I might be being a bit OCD about it all but Fran said that the place would have sent me insane by now, if I was suffering from OCD! I really like trying to make order out of chaos – I know it won't stay like it for long with so many different people having access to all areas, but at least it looks better for a while and we are able to find things more easily.

This weekend there has been a Woodland Weekend in Fran and Kevin's oak wood a couple of miles away. There are a few bodgers who meet up there at least once a month so we went over to see what they were doing and have a go at making something, if we wanted to. I spent all day Saturday making a wooden spoon using an axe, a knife and a spoon shaper. It was quite hard work and my hands really ached at the end of the afternoon, but it was great fun and such a nice bunch of people. We all had a big stew at lunchtime cooked on a tripod over an open fire – this was added to during the day and we had a curried version for supper too before heading back to the farm. Today, I added the finishing touches to my spoon, helped prepare another stew and took some photos of the new compost loo under construction. I was hoping to have a go on the pole lathe, but other people got there first, so that may have to wait until another time. Another family came today, as well, and the mum cooked Welsh cakes on a griddle over the fire – they were really delicious.

I am due to leave here during the second week in August to head back to Mum's for a few days before heading off to the Cropredy music festival in Oxfordshire with my sister and brother-in-law. I'm hoping that all this rain will have stopped by then as the last time I went, two years ago, I got soaked to the skin despite wearing 'waterproofs'!